Signing a pledge that condemns what you do, as a condition for protecting the health of your community, goes against everything we know about H.I.V. prevention and sex work. One of us, Betania, is a sex worker and can personally attest that agreeing to the anti-prostitution pledge would mean taking an oath against herself. It is out of the question.

Any action or policy that reinforces stigma around sex work not only contributes to bad health outcomes, but perpetuates bad laws and stigmas against "bad sex."

This is why Davida — the collective we are both involved in — fought the anti-prostitution pledge alongside the Brazilian National AIDS Program in partnership with dozens of sex worker rights and AIDS organizations in 2005. In a decision that reflected the government's conviction that sex workers are central to Brazil's H.I.V. response, the country turned down $40 million for H.I.V. prevention.

The idea that the mere administration of services is enough to fight H.I.V. misses the point of prevention: Sex workers need to be protagonists of these programs, not just receivers of them.

The Brazilian Network of Prostitutes, founded by Gabriela Leite and Lourdes Barreto in 1987, pioneered an approach to H.I.V. prevention centered on respect for the profession, fighting victimization in all of its forms, and a recognition of the central role that stigma plays in spreading H.I.V. For decades, Brazilian sex workers led H.I.V. prevention programs that were widely recognized for their creativity, affirmative nature and effectiveness.

In 2005, Gabriela Leite was in New York shortly after the anti-prostitution pledge was implemented. Although she loved the city, she wrote in her Beijo da rua column, “How could I be happy in a country that is so conservative and puritanical when it comes to sexuality?”

We ask similar questions today, only this time, of Brazil. The country’s rights-based response has been eroding over the past few years and the current coup threatens to further undo all that Gabriela Leite and so many other sex worker and AIDS activists fought for, including the very foundation of Brazil’s universal public health system. In this scenario, international funding free of restrictions such as the anti-prostitution pledge becomes increasingly crucial for the kinds of interventions we know work.

Our fight is about visibility in society, and not just in health clinics. It is as women, workers and feminists. We all exchange something to make a living. None of us should have to sign something against who we are to access health care that we have a right to receive.